


Statement ########: High Praise

by LiquidMirrors



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Horror, Original Character(s), Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Religious Conflict, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Spoilers for The Magnus Archives Season 5, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:21:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27153080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiquidMirrors/pseuds/LiquidMirrors
Summary: An examination of faith.
Relationships: None
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	Statement ########: High Praise

[TAPE CLICKS.]

[IN THE BACKGROUND , THERE ARE CHURCH BELLS. THEY ECHO IN THE DRONING NOTHINGNESS OF THE WORLD. THEY ARE JARRING, DISCORDANT, AND TUNELESS.]

[IN THE DISTANCE, FAR AWAY, THERE IS A GUST OF WIND.]

[TAPE STATIC.]

  
STATEMENT BEGINS  
  


“Today is a blessed day.

“Today is a day unlike any other, a day in which we reflect and give our praises up above into the gaping maw of our Beloved, who holds uncaring and silent thoughts down towards us as we attempt to satisfy it with our Praise.

Children, today is a holy day, a day where we whisper our thanks so piously, in hopes to not be held up to scrutiny, disdain, held accountable, or the most grave damnation of them all; worthlessness.

The seeds I have planted, the thoughts of worship buried and fed to be sown - they were placed to spread past the walls of this place, to flourish and spread outwards from this hallowed ground to encompass those willing to kneel down and become humbled in turn. Let our Beloved stare down at us from great heights, and we tremble in its grandiosity, reaching from horizon to horizon and extending farther still.

May we be overshadowed in its beauty, and be rendered nothing in its eyes.”

Mary kneels in a pew, head tilting towards the floor. While she, like the other clergymen, is in a position of prayer, her racing thoughts betray her exterior. Her shins and thighs are rendered sore from kneeling, her legs begging for her to sit up properly. She knows she cannot, though, as that would be a disturbance to the priest’s prayers and calls up towards the heavens. Mary feels lethargic, the smells of polished oak benches and communion wine both having gone bitter and sour a very long time ago. Mary does not fully remember how long this liturgy has lasted, but she certainly knows this is one of many cyclical ramblings the man on the altar has uttered to the Flock.

Mary begrudgingly lifts up her head, turning it to scan the church. To her left, she sees her mother, hunched in prayer, eyes squeezed shut in concentration. Her hands are coated in a thin layer of dust, and her lips mumble and twist out pleading words on the safety of her husband in the great Skies Above. Mary sees that her mother is crying,

To her right, Mary sees her aunt, done up in layers and layers of makeup, so much colors and shades as to look tacky instead of stylish. Her lipstick is smeared across her chin and teeth, and the dry eggshell blue eyeshadow she had applied now falls onto her eyelashes and cheeks like dandruff. She is smiling through shut eyes, confident in her goodness at heart, a goodness that Mary has yet to see in the decades of living with her.

All around her, Mary sees men and women of all ages, heads bowed in prayer. Some muttered and mumbled feverishly like her mother, while others snuck poisonous smiles to themselves like her aunt. Though, if Mary looked carefully, she noticed that some looked worn out and tired, with cheekbones sunken in from exhaustion and their Sunday best draped along thin arms and legs like loose rags. Mary caught the gaze of one of these parishioners, and his sclera was a foggy grey-blue that reminded her of the sky.

The chorus begins to sing and Mary feels the pressure in her chest tighten. Curling tendrils of smoke begin to swirl and encompass the pews, reeking not of holy incense, but instead of ozone. Why do they smell like ozone? The tendrils reach high, crawling up the stained glass windows where the only thing Mary sees portrayed is a giant hand reaching towards a crowd of believers. Whether it is going to crush them or raise them into the clouds, it isn’t clear, yet Mary finds both outcomes equally upsetting.

As Mary looks up from her pew and sits up straight, her eyes trail the wafting ozone, floating up higher and higher, clawing at the walls - how high  _ were _ they, exactly? She hadn’t looked up from her prayers for such a very long time.

When her gaze finally reaches the ceiling high up above, Mary sees it. It is then that she realizes that the church never had a ceiling at all. Instead, she sees exactly what she had been praying to, and her thoughts began to scramble.

How can it go so  far ? How can it see right through her very being, how can it completely analyze her in a single glance when she is nothing but the smallest insignificance in a clamoring cacophony of  _ noise _ ? It stares into the very essence of her while simultaneously looking  _ through _ her, watching and - ignoring? casting aside? judging? - her through and through. Mary knows nothing of its thoughts, so instead of watching it as it watches her, she lunges forward, her heartbeat consuming her thoughts and her mind threatening to flee out of its own sheer panic. Mary lunges forward, facing the wooden floorboard and clasping her hands together so tightly that her fingers, palms, and knuckles are as bone-white as the stale communion wafers.

As she prays, she begs for it to spare her, to spare her mother, still in mourning, to spare her aunt despite her sharp tongue. Mary begs in silence that the enormity above them all will spare her and those she loves, but in the very corners of her thoughts, she knows that her pleading falls into nothing. Why should it care about helping her when she was nothing but a dust mite to it? The only thing it would care about, if it could even care at all, was where it would step to crush the vile things underfoot - are we vile to it?

The preacher is now back to his podium, expelling valiant words about the Welcome and Glorious Above, and Mary cannot stand it anymore. She opens her eyes only to see gaps in the pews where moments ago, there were none. She turns her head frantically, noticing that her mother on her left was gone, yet her aunt on the right was still smiling. As Mary scans the now-halved clergy, she, once again, catches the gaze of the man with the sickly eyes. He is standing up fully now, his spine creaking and crackling as he flexes muscles that haven’t been stretched in years. He looks up at the ceiling, and the last thing Mary can make out are his feet as he is swiftly pulled out of view. It was so quick, so silent, that Mary didn’t even have a chance to react. When one of his tattered shoes hit the ground, she screamed.

Mary stood up and shoved through her aunt and the line of other parishioners, practically running over and on top of them to make it to the central aisle. Her back and legs screamed in response - she was not ready for this, but she needed to get out before it took her as well. The ozone clogged her throat as she stumbled, ran, and crawled towards the doors that were behind her, She hadn’t turned around in so long that she had forgotten how they looked. As Mary grabbed the handles and pushed, she could feel the eyes of every single clergy member in that room, piercing into her, judging. Worst of all, she could feel the eyes of the thing above her, in all of its glory. No matter - when she opened the doors fully, there would be a road, there would be a path out of there, there would be a place she could escape to and never be encompassed again.

But as Mary fully opened the doors and was about to hurl herself through them, all she saw…

...was a nothingness.

There was no ground. Only open air.

There is no sky. Instead of sky, more of  _ it _ stares into Mary. More of itself.

In this nothingness, it is all that she can see.

Afraid, humbled, and broken, Mary stumbles backwards a few steps. She falls, pushing herself away from the door as it takes up the entire doorway, looking at her and those who kneeled before its grace. It looks down at her, and Mary screams before she is taken, just like the rest.

Her voice echoes through the chamber, and the clergy all turn back to the altar, once again kneeling, once again clasping their hands, once again preparing themselves to pray. The preacher smiles, and his teeth are cracked and disgusting and his breath smells like dust. He raises his hands up, proclaiming gifts to be given from and to the clergy. They cry and pray and bask in their smug narcissicm.

All around them, its intent is useless to describe.

And its reach?

Farther than even the mad can imagine.

STATMENT ENDS

[TAPE CLICKS.]

**Author's Note:**

> When I was little, my family would go to church every Sunday. As I grew older, it started sinking in how enormous God actually was. It became something I, to a degree, became afraid of - how could something so massive and humongous pay any attention to all of us, and what scared me even more was how he still was able to, despite how small we all were. I know this story translated the Vast in a strange way, but I tried my best! The enormity of religion and spiritualism always opened up this Pandora's Box for me on how small we actually were anyways, and how much those deities could actually care for us. I think this fear crosses the minds of some faithful too, which is what drove me to write this. Splash a healthy dose of Eye imagery and boom, we got a hellscape.


End file.
